Married Women and the Law
Married Women and the Law

Author: Tim Stretton

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2013-12-01

Total Pages: 347

ISBN-13: 0773590145

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Explaining the curious legal doctrine of "coverture," William Blackstone famously declared that "by marriage, husband and wife are one person at law." This "covering" of a wife's legal identity by her husband meant that the greatest subordination of women to men developed within marriage. In England and its colonies, generations of judges, legislators, and husbands invoked coverture to limit married women's rights and property, but there was no monolithic concept of coverture and their justifications shifted to fit changing times: Were husband and wife lord and subject? Master and servant? Guardian and ward? Or one person at law? The essays in Married Women and the Law offer new insights into the legal effects of marriage for women from medieval to modern times. Focusing on the years prior to the passage of the Divorce Acts and Married Women's Property Acts in the late nineteenth century, contributors examine a variety of jurisdictions in the common law world, from civil courts to ecclesiastical and criminal courts. By bringing together studies of several common law jurisdictions over a span of centuries, they show how similar legal rules persisted and developed in different environments. This volume reveals not only legal changes and the women who creatively used or subverted coverture, but also astonishing continuities. Accessibly written and coherently presented, Married Women and the Law is an important look at the persistence of one of the longest lived ideas in British legal history. Contributors include Sara M. Butler (Loyola), Marisha Caswell (Queen’s), Mary Beth Combs (Fordham), Angela Fernandez (Toronto), Margaret Hunt (Amherst), Kim Kippen (Toronto), Natasha Korda (Wesleyan), Lindsay Moore (Boston), Barbara J. Todd (Toronto), and Danaya C. Wright (Florida).

Wives & Property
Wives & Property

Author: Lee Holcombe

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 1983-12-15

Total Pages: 490

ISBN-13: 1487590180

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In the 1870s Millicent Garrett Fawcett had her purse snatched by a young thief in London. When he appeared in court to testify, she heard the young man charged with 'stealing from the person of Millicent Fawcett a purse containing £1 18s 6d the property of Henry Fawcett.' Long after the episode she recalled: 'I felt as if I had been charged with theft myself.' The English common law which deprived married women of the right to own and control property had far-reaching consequences for the status of women not only in other areas of law and in family life but also in education, and employment, and public life. To win reform of the married women's property law, feminism as an organized movement appeared in the 1850s, and the final success of the campaigns for reform in 1882 was one of the greatest achievements of the Victorian women's movement. Dr Holcombe explores the story of the reform campaign in the context of its time, giving particular attention to the many important men and women who worked for reform and to the debates on the subject which contributed greatly to the formulation of a philosophy of feminism.

Married Women and Property Law in Victorian Ontario
Married Women and Property Law in Victorian Ontario

Author: Anne Lorene Chambers

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 1997-01-01

Total Pages: 1388

ISBN-13: 9780802078391

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A meticulously researched and revisionist study of the nineteenth-century Ontario's Married Women's Property Acts. They were important landmarks in the legal emancipation of women.

A Woman's Kingdom
A Woman's Kingdom

Author: Michelle Lamarche Marrese

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-09-05

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1501728512

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In A Woman's Kingdom, Michelle Lamarche Marrese explores the development of Russian noblewomen's unusual property rights. In contrast to women in Western Europe, who could not control their assets during marriage until the second half of the nineteenth century, married women in Russia enjoyed the right to alienate and manage their fortunes beginning in 1753. Marrese traces the extension of noblewomen's right to property and places this story in the broader context of the evolution of private property in Russia before the Great Reforms of the 1860s. Historians have often dismissed women's property rights as meaningless. In the patriarchal society of Imperial Russia, a married woman could neither work nor travel without her husband's permission, and divorce was all but unattainable. Yet, through a detailed analysis of women's property rights from the Petrine era through the abolition of serfdom in 1861, Marrese demonstrates the significance of noblewomen's proprietary power. She concludes that Russian noblewomen were unique not only for the range of property rights available to them, but also for the active exercise of their legal prerogatives.A remarkably broad source base provides a solid foundation for Marrese's conclusions. These sources comprise more than eight thousand transactions from notarial records documenting a variety of property transfers, property disputes brought to the Senate, noble family papers, and a vast memoir literature. A Woman's Kingdom stands as a masterful challenge to the existing, androcentric view of noble society in Russia before Emancipation.

Married Women's Separate Property in England, 1660-1833
Married Women's Separate Property in England, 1660-1833

Author: Susan Staves

Publisher:

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13:

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A critical history of the laws governing married women's property in England. Analyzing the laws and the ideology underpinning them, Staves (English, Brandeis U.) shows that while the judges had some room to maneuver, they chose to act on (and act out) their own prejudices. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR